Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [252]
Since Longhi staged his ground-breaking exhibition, Caravaggio’s influence has continued to spread. But his work seems to have been less of an inspiration to those ploughing the increasingly conceptualist fields of fine art than to those working with photography and film. One of the few painters to have had a profound impact on disciplines other than painting itself, he may fairly be considered as a pioneer of modern cinematography. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who made some of the most powerful Italian films of the 1960s, was profoundly influenced by Caravaggio’s sense of light, by his narrative directness, and by his casting of poor and ordinary working people in leading roles. Martin Scorsese, one of the most gifted American directors of the last forty years, has been disarmingly explicit about the depth of his own admiration for Caravaggio. He was introduced to the painter’s work in the late 1960s by screenwriter Paul Schrader when they were working on Taxi Driver, his film about a vigilante killer taking on New York’s underworld of drug dealers and whores. He sees Caravaggio very much with the eyes of someone looking for things he can use, borrow, adapt. In Scorsese’s words, the long tradition of Caravaggio as a true artist’s artist is both reincarnated and refreshed. It is worth quoting him at length:
I was instantly taken by the power of the pictures, the power of the compositions, the action in the frames, the way he designed the composition and the subject matter … there was no doubt it could be taken into cinema because of the use of light and shadow, the chiaroscuro effect …
Initially I related to the paintings because of the moment that he chose to illuminate in the story. The Conversion of Paul, Judith Beheading Holofernes: he was choosing a moment that was not the absolute moment of the beginning of the action, it’s during the action, in a way. You sort of come upon the scene midway and you’re immersed in it. It was very different from the composition of the paintings that preceded it, the Renaissance paintings. It was like modern staging in film. It was as if we had just come in the middle of scene and it was all happening. It was so powerful and direct. It was startling, really. He would have been a great film-maker, there’s no doubt about it. I thought, I can use this too …
So then he was there. He sort of pervaded the entirety of the bar sequences in another film I made around then, Mean Streets. There’s no doubt about that. He was there in the way I wanted the camera movement, the choice of how to stage a scene. It’s basically people sitting in bars, people at tables, people getting up, that sort of thing. The Calling of Matthew, but in New York! Making films with street people was what it was really about, like he made paintings with them. They weren’t like the usual models from the Renaissance. They were people who were really living life. That’s why it played into my mind in Mean Streets …
Then that extended into a much later film, The Temptation of Christ. Why couldn’t we have people who lived on the street play apostles? They had been fishermen, Jesus was a carpenter. Caravaggio takes the Virgin Mary and has a prostitute play the Virgin Mary. She’s a woman and the Virgin Mary’s a woman. It’s shocking and provocative. It doesn’t judge the person. It doesn’t make judgement on the prostitute when making her the Virgin and this is something very powerful and compassionate …
So in doing The Last Temptation of Christ the idea was that Jesus was going to be Jesus Christ on Eighth Avenue and 49th